Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition Hex-Core Processor Performance Review

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open path to the Zone’s center, the government decides to stage a large-scale operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine, allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX 11 to be fully integrated; one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tessellation. Regions and maps feature photo realistic scenes of the region it is made to represent. There is also extensive support for older versions of DirectX, meaning that Call of Pripyat is also compatible with older DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1 graphics cards.

The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP has no internal benchmarking tools built into the game engine, but they do have a standalone benchmark available that we used for our testing purposes. The screen capture above shows the main window of the benchmark with our settings. Notice we are running Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting “DX11” as our renderer.

Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and the Intel Core i7 990X Extreme didn’t seem to play well together. Looking at the above chart, it stands out to me that the two hex core processors that we tested were in the bottom spot. At 1920×1080 there was only 1.8 frames per second separating the 990X from the top spot 2600K and only 1.8 frames per second at 1280×1024.

Looking for a way to explain this, we turned to task manager and found that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat isn’t threaded too well. In fact we only saw signs of life in four of the 12 threads with the majority being loaded up in one thread on CPU0.